RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Sculpting New Visual Concepts into the Human Brain
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.10.14.339853
DO 10.1101/2020.10.14.339853
A1 Marius Cătălin Iordan
A1 Victoria J. H. Ritvo
A1 Kenneth A. Norman
A1 Nicholas B. Turk-Browne
A1 Jonathan D. Cohen
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/15/2020.10.14.339853.abstract
AB Learning requires changing the brain. This typically occurs through experience, study, or instruction. We report a new way of acquiring conceptual knowledge by directly sculpting activity patterns in the human brain. We used a non-invasive technique (closed-loop real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging) to create novel categories of visual objects in the brain. After training, participants exhibited behavioral and neural biases for the sculpted, but not control categories. The ability to sculpt new conceptual distinctions in the human brain, applied here to perception, has broad relevance to other domains of cognition such as decision-making, memory, and motor control. As such, the work opens up new frontiers in brain-machine interface design, neuroprosthetics, and neurorehabilitation.One Sentence Summary Sculpting new visual categories in the brain with neurofeedback restructured subjective experience and neural processing.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.